161–170 of 457 posts
Users: I like AMP pages, they're fast! HN: But the open Internet! Users: What's that? HN: Normal websites! Users: Like...the really slow ones? With all the annoying popovers? And pages that take forever to load? And for some reason cause my fancy new phone to slow to a crawl? HN: Well, those websites should rewrite their entire codebase to be faster. Users: That doesn't help me, though. HN: Trust in the free market!…
I suggest stop using google search altogether. https://duckduckgo.com/ is an excellent search engine and its trivial to make a google search via `!g` prefix when you are not finding what you are looking for.
I'm trying to imagine the uproar if Apple had done AMP instead of Google. Somehow AMP has some staunch defenders, but everything, and I mean everything about how it's been approached has felt very anti-web and pro-Google. The overall concept may be sound, but the implementation, and the inability to escape it, has significantly hurt my opinion of Google. In fact, I no longer use Google's search because of it.
Do you think there would be an uproar? Apple introduced reading mode, built-in content/ad blocking, etc. AMP actually fits in the profile of Apple -- prioritizing a fast, usable solution. This author notes that they "feel bad" about consuming AMP content. Which is extremely weird given that content creators intentionally volunteer their content to AMP (aside from this user who got famous claiming that Google was stea…
I found this comment interesting as well. I really like the instant load aspect and would much rather not waste time waiting for a slow page to load.
I think the author feels that the free hosting provided by AMP is overshadowed by the loss of personal ad revenue from the traffic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I started using DDG a few months back and I've been very happy so far. Sometimes results aren't as great, so I just use !g to load Google. But even better, you can search across different websites! For example, !mdn for Mozilla Developer Network, or !yt for YouTube Another thing you can do is use alternative browsers. On mobile I use Firefox Mobile, which has the benefit of allowing extensions, so you can install uBl…
I actually find DDG results to be better and more relevant a lot of the time nowadays. The only thing Google really has an edge on (for my use) is searching for academic articles, because of Google Scholar.
Except scientific articles. I've yet to find a service that comes anywhere close to Google Scholar, which I think is the most successful of their products for my use case.
Marketing has taken the lead in corporate websites projects to the detriment of the end-users, AMP puts the user in the center.
I mean, if you take AMP to it's logical conclusion why should Google allow anyone to host their own webpages when Google can host them all better and faster.
AMP is bad and anyone who's invested in it should feel shameful for making the internet a worse place.
In terms of "a worse place", well, as a user, I disagree. I wish it wasn't necessary but it clearly is.
Users: I like AMP pages, they're fast! HN: But the open Internet! Users: What's that? HN: Normal websites! Users: Like...the really slow ones? With all the annoying popovers? And pages that take forever to load? And for some reason cause my fancy new phone to slow to a crawl? HN: Well, those websites should rewrite their entire codebase to be faster. Users: That doesn't help me, though. HN: Trust in the free market!…
Fast is good, but at least it ought to be a good user experience. I used to use google news a lot, but i totally abandoned it after constant frustrating experiences with AMP. Plus most of the amp-ified pages don't seem significantly faster than the original page. I'm not seeing the utility for users, just for google.
Reminds me of this: http://blackhat.com/media/bh-usa-97/blackhat-eetimes.html
As far as I can tell, in order to be "forced" on a user, AMP must rely on javascript, the browser used or maybe the OS (I trust they are not rewriting search results to point to AMP but that could be another one).
A no javascript command line tcp client will retrieve the page without automatically following the amphtml link. Users thus have a choice. And if choosing the amphtml link it is easy to filter out everything but the text of the page (the content). In that sense AMP is quite nice.
The "forced" nature of AMP should make users think about these points of control for advertisers and Google: javascript, browser, OS. Maybe website owners will think about them too the next time they "recommend" or "require" certain browsers. Web should be javascript, browser and OS neutral.